Joseph Schillinger

Joseph Schillinger and the Rhythmicon

Joseph Moiseyevich Schillinger (Russian: Иосиф Моисеевич Шиллингер, 1 September 1895 – 23 March 1943) was a composer, music theorist, and composition teacher who originated the Schillinger System of Musical Composition. He was born in Kharkiv, in the Kharkov Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine) and died in New York City.

Life and career

The unprecedented migration of European knowledge and culture that swept from East to West during the first decades of the 20th Century included figures such as Prokofiev and Rachmaninov, great composers who were the product of the renowned Russian system of music education. Schillinger came from this background, dedicated to creating truly professional musicians, having been a student of the St Petersburg Imperial Conservatory of Music. Unlike his more famous contemporaries, Schillinger was a natural teacher and communicated his musical knowledge in the form of a precise written theory, using mathematical expressions to describe art, architecture, design and (most insistently, and with most detail and success) music.

In New York, Schillinger flourished, becoming famous as the advisor to many of America’s leading popular musicians and concert music composers including George Gershwin, Earle Brown, Burt Bacharach, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Oscar Levant, Tommy Dorsey and Henry Cowell.

George Gershwin spent four years (1932–1936) studying with Schillinger. During this period, he composed Porgy and Bess and consulted Schillinger on matters concerning the opera, particularly its orchestration. There has been some disagreement about the nature of Schillinger's influence on Gershwin. After the posthumous success of Porgy and Bess, Schillinger claimed he had a large and direct influence in overseeing the creation of the opera; George's brother Ira Gershwin completely denied that his brother had any such assistance for this work. A third account of Gershwin's musical relationship with his teacher was written by Gershwin's close friend Vernon Duke, also a Schillinger student, in an article for The Musical Quarterly in 1947.[1] Some of Gershwin's notebooks from his studies with Joseph Schillinger can be found at the Library of Congress.

In the field of electronic music, Schillinger collaborated with Léon Theremin, the inventor of an early electronic musical instrument, the Theremin. Schillinger wrote his First Airphonic Suite for Léon Theremin, who played the instrument at the premiere in 1929 with the Cleveland Orchestra, conducted by Nikolai Sokoloff.

Chart by Joseph Schillinger graphing Johann Sebastian Bach's Invention no. 8 in F Major, BWV 779

His mathematical principles were applied to various fields other than music. For example, Schillinger collaborated with the film maker Mary Ellen Bute and he also published a new method of notating choreography.

In the USA Schillinger taught at a number of educational institutions but his greatest success was his postal tuition courses, which later became The Schillinger System of Musical Composition, published posthumously in a 2 volume set compiled by Lyle Dowling and Arnold Shaw.

Schillinger accredited a small group of students as qualified teachers of the System and after his death, one of them, Lawrence Berk, founded a music school in Boston to continue the dissemination of the System. Schillinger House opened in 1945 and later became the Berklee College of Music where the System survived in the curriculum until the 1960s.

There has been debate surrounding how many teachers were certified by Schillinger himself. The numbers cited range from seven to twelve certified teachers. Yet, to date, only seven certified teachers of the Schillinger System have been substantiated. Two certified teachers were Asher Zlotnik of Baltimore, Maryland, a student and personal friend of Lyle Dowling[2] and Edwin Gerschefski.[3]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Dukelsky, Vladimir (Vernon Duke) (1947). "Gerswhin, Schillinger, and Dukelsky: Some Reminiscences" (PDF). The Musical Quarterly 33: 102–115. doi:10.1093/mq/xxxiii.1.102. Retrieved 22 April 2011.
  2. ↑ "Asher G. Zlotnik Papers". University of Maryland Special Collections in Performing Arts. Retrieved 31 July 2013.
  3. ↑ Goss, Glenda Dawn, Jean Sibelius: A Guide to Research, Routledge (Routledge Music Bibliographies), 1997. ISBN 978-0-8153-1171-3. Cf. p.216 on Edwin Gerschefski in the summary of his son's (Peter Edwin Gerschefski) Ph.D. thesis at Florida State University in 1962 on Jean Sibelius.

Further reading

External links

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